The first of the two main points I would like the reader to take
away from this essay is that, at least since the 1960s, "America"
(USA) has become an important, consequential trope in world drama,
one that deserves a lot more attention than scholarship has paid
it. My recently published American "Unculture" in French
Drama , for instance, covers a great number of post-1960 plays
about "America" written by French continental dramatists, plays
which assume an all-American perspective and focus on American
people and places. It examines in particular the French fascination
with what I call, after Jean Baudrillard and Régis Debray, the
"unculture" of a postmodern type of "homo americanus," representing
an (anti-)intellectual mind-set, an exceptionalist self-image, and
a materialistic lifestyle that are globally prominent but
concentrated in the United States—which brings me to the second
point I would like to make. The trope of "America" tells a somewhat
different story when it issues from a different selection of the
world's francophone population, one with a dissimilar geopolitical
history and a contrasting and turbulent cultural reality. A working
comparison between the continental French plays about America and
the ways in which today's generation of postcolonial francophone
dramatists responds to "America" in their writing shows that the
latter shift their attention from any "reality" of American
"unculture" and toward an idealized notion of America as a model
for their own perspective on globalizing humanity. Koffi Kwahulé
stands out for his dramaturgical fascination with the subject of
America, and this essay will cover two of his plays that draw
heavily on this subject.

In culinary lingo the recipe for my discussion of Kwahulé's
America plays would read as follows: take one West African
expatriate dramatist (a product, in part, of both the specific
artistic framework and the humanistic vitality of the Ivorian
source culture), one prominent Western European culture (the
intellectual and artistic infrastructures being equally enriched by
France's unique sociopolitical freedoms and problematized by its
history of colonial and postcolonial abuses and its remnant
racism), and one mediated/media-assisted idea of a
super-hegemonic global culture: America. Bring them all together
and you're likely to produce a planetary stew of the
"world-totality" kind, as Edouard Glissant might envision it.

What does Edouard Glissant mean when he expresses the future of
humanity in terms of "world-totality"? In culinary terms, once
again, he's talking not so much about a (subtle yet predictable)
cosmopolitan dining experience as about a much less
predictable and more randomly constituted creole potluck ,
which Glissant believes will be the dietary (read "cultural")
staple of the global village yet to come. Something of an outspoken
visionary in the field of world culture-making, Glissant warns
Westerners that, in the move toward "world-totality," they must get
used to the idea of sacrificing their "unique root identity" for a
relational or rhizomatic identity: "that is, the root that digs
down but that also extends its branches laterally toward other
roots." "World-totality," Glissant believes, will depend on our
progress toward a transnational creolization, involving the
"contact, conflict, attraction, harmony, repulsion, dissemblance,
resemblance between cultures of the world," resulting in what he
calls "a chaos-world [,] not because it is a world in
disorder, but because it is an unpredictable world." Today's
generation of African writers, I believe, see themselves to some
extent as both reconnaissance outriders and progenitors on
humanity's journey toward a reconciliation with this "chaos-world."
They act, as a character from one of Koffi Kwahulé's plays puts it,
as "the elder sons of the world."

Setting aside the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversities
among African nations, francophone Africa is well placed
historically and culturally to spearhead the move toward the global
village. The continent, with its many tribes and nations, has been
dynamically involved in world-making since the beginnings of the
global slave trade in the seventeenth century. Consequently,
post-independence, postcolonial African intellectual classes have
become remarkably conscious of their role in both involuntary and
voluntary processes of world-making, from Africans' forced
displacement into slavery in the West, to their colonial domination
and then the...

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